Journalists investigating alleged corruption among prosecutors,
judges, and police officers face a difficult question: Can they afford to
alienate the very officials responsible for protecting them? The murders of
successive editors of Tolyattinskoye Obozreniye—a newspaper
that exposes crime and corruption in the Volga River city of Togliatti—highlight
the grave risks of examining possible connections between criminal gangs and
law enforcement officials.

An industrial city of 700,000 about 600 miles (950 kilometers)
southeast of Moscow, Togliatti is home to a 1,500-acre assembly plant for
AvtoVAZ, the country’s largest carmaker. In the early 1990s, ethnic gangs
fought battles in the streets to get a toehold at AvtoVAZ, where billions of
rubles could be made stealing parts and cars, skimming profits, and extorting
protection money from car dealers. Valery Ivanov and Aleksei Sidorov met during
this violent, freewheeling era. Students at a teachers college in neighboring
Samara, Ivanov, 21, and Sidorov, two years younger, worked together at the
school newspaper during the 1990-91 academic year, according to Terry Gould, a
Canadian journalist who investigated the murders of the Togliatti editors for
his 2009 book, Marked for Death: Dying for the Story in the World’s Most
Dangerous Places.

It was an exciting but chaotic time for journalists. They were
free to expose criminal gangs and corrupt bureaucrats, but they did so without
state financial subsidies and the state-imposed stability of the Soviet era. In
1993 and 1994, Ivanov and Sidorov wrote about local crime and corruption for
tabloids in Samara and Togliatti, Tolyattinskoye Obozreniye reported in
an account of its history. Ivanov had even bigger ambitions: He spent much of
1995 seeking funding to start his own paper, eventually opening a car
dealership and travel agency and funneling the profits into a bold new
publication, Tolyattinskoye Obozreniye.

“The newspaper was set up to conduct investigations, to find
political, social, and criminal issues and unravel them,” Stella Ivanova, the
editor’s sister, recalled in an interview with CPJ. The first monthly issue of Tolyattinskoye
Obozreniye came out just before the September 1996 municipal elections.
Despite a burglary at their office in which equipment and documents were taken,
the editors put out a newspaper full of critical candidate portraits, Gould
recounted. It caused a local sensation.

As the paper’s popularity and advertising grew, Editor-in-Chief
Ivanov and Deputy Editor Sidorov hired a team of tough-minded reporters to
produce exposés on crime and corruption. The aggressive reporting earned the
paper powerful enemies and led to death threats, libel suits, and occasional
questioning by police and Federal Security Service officers seeking to identify
the paper’s sources, staff members said in interviews with CPJ.

In the 2000 municipal election, Ivanov won a seat on the
Togliatti city council, where he was appointed chairman of a committee looking
into potentially rigged city contracts, according to press reports. He was not
above using his political position to further his reporting. With Ivanov’s
access to internal government documents, Tolyattinskoye Obozreniye reported in
December 2001 that the city was paying above-market gasoline prices for its
buses even as the bus drivers were going unpaid, Gould recounted. The article
sparked a political crisis as bus drivers went on strike and AvtoVAZ workers
couldn’t get to their jobs.

By 2002, Ivanov’s stewardship of Tolyattinskoye
Obozreniye, then a daily, led him to believe that corrupt public officials
played the most significant role in the local crime scene, Gould wrote in an
extensive account of the case. Ivanov’s reporting focused increasingly on
alleged financial links between local politicians and criminals, colleagues
told CPJ, causing them to become ever more fearful for his safety. In April,
Ivanov was looking closely at allegations that local law enforcement officials
had pocketed the assets of reputed gangster Dmitry Ruzlyaev, who was slain in
1998, Tolyattinskoye
Obozreniye journalists told CPJ. He never finished the article.

On April 29, 2002, as Ivanov was getting into a car outside his
home at about 11 p.m., an assailant shot him multiple times in the head at
point-blank range, according to local press reports.

Eyewitnesses saw a man in his mid- to late 20s walk up to Ivanov’s
car and shoot him, using a pistol apparently fitted with a silencer, and then
flee on foot, press reports said.

Authorities initially said they were examining Ivanov’s
government work, his journalism, and a purported business rivalry as potential
motives. “Prosecutors and police worked actively on the case, in my opinion,
for a very short time, about two to three months,” Yelena Ivanova, the editor’s
widow, told CPJ. “I think they weren’t very interested in solving the case.”

Investigators soon focused on an alleged business-related plot, Tolyattinskoye
Obozreniye journalists told CPJ. Authorities alleged that a rival media
company had commissioned a criminal gang leader to eliminate Ivanov, and the
gang leader had in turn delegated the job to another man, according to press
reports and CPJ interviews. After Ivanov’s murder, the official version went,
the killer died of a drug overdose. No one was charged.

“They tried to blame the murder on some dead drug addict,”Rimma
Mikhareva, deputy editor of Tolyattinskoye Obozreniye, told CPJ.
After conducting its own research, she said, the paper concluded that the
government’s assertions were not credible.

A year later, with no evident activity in the investigation,
Ivanov’s family members sought a meeting with Yevgeny Novozhilov, a Samara
deputy prosecutor who was handling cases in Togliatti at the time. Relatives
told CPJ that Novozhilov was unwilling to discuss details. In a 2004 interview
with CPJ, Novozhilov said he was under no obligation to disclose such information.
The Togliatti prosecutor’s office did not respond to written questions
submitted by CPJ in June 2009.

Karen Nersisian, a lawyer representing Ivanov’s family, told CPJ
that he formally sought access to the investigative file three times between
2004 and 2006 but was denied. Russian procedural code gives investigators
discretion to disclose details of an active probe to a victim’s family or legal
representatives. “We never found out which potential versions of the crime they
investigated—or whether they did anything at all,” said Nersisian, who would
later represent the Sidorov family in similarly tragic circumstances.

Sidorov replaced his slain
colleague, vowing to complete Ivanov’s unfinished article, find the editor’s
killers, and continue the newspaper’s aggressive reporting. After all, Sidorov
told The New York Times, “They can’t kill us all.” By fall, he started receiving death threats
and was concerned enough that he hired a bodyguard and twice left Togliatti for
short periods, colleagues told CPJ. Still, Sidorov pushed ahead with the
paper’s investigative work, exploring alleged criminal ownership of local
businesses and charges of judicial corruption, colleagues and family members
told CPJ.

He also continued working on Ivanov’s unfinished investigation,
eventually pursuing financial documents that he believed would link law
enforcement officials to Ruzlyaev’s missing assets, colleagues told CPJ. On the
evening of October 9, 2003, Sidorov told a colleague he had received an
important batch of documents and was prepared to finish the article, according
to local press reports. Documents in hand, he went home to meet guests.

As Sidorov walked toward his apartment building at about 9 p.m.,
several witnesses said, two men followed while a third stabbed the editor
several times in the chest and quickly searched him, according to local press
reports. Sidorov bled to death in the arms of his wife, who had heard his calls
for help and rushed down to the building’s entrance. By then, the assailants
were gone and the documents were missing.

Police and prosecutors initially said
Sidorov’s murder appeared to be a contract killing in retaliation for his work,
but they soon changed their public position and labeled it a random street
crime. On October 12, 2003, local police detained Yevgeny Maininger, 29, a
welder at a local factory, and interrogated him for three days, according to
Sidorov’s colleagues. The prolonged questioning produced a confession.
Novozhilov, the prosecutor,told local reportersthat an intoxicated Maininger stumbled upon Sidorov that evening,
appealed for some vodka, and then murdered the editor in a rage when he was
rebuffed.

Tolyattinskoye Obozreniye
Editor-in-Chief Sergei Davydov, who had worked under Ivanov and Sidorov, told
CPJ he believes local authorities were under political pressure to classify the
slaying as a street crime. “The investigators and local law enforcement
officials got a nonverbal, but firm message to stick to the ‘street crime’
version until the end of the case,” he said. Added Vladimir Sidorov, the
victim’s father: “Many witnesses were not fully questioned; newspaper articles
and computer files were practically ignored.”

Dismissing skepticism from Sidorov’s family and colleagues,
prosecutors charged Maininger with murder on October 21. The defendant didn’t
stand by his confession very long: In November, Maininger retracted his
statement and said it had been coerced. Nersisian, the lawyer for the victim’s
family, pointed to other details that undercut the prosecution as the case
unfolded over the next year. Maininger’s co-workers, for example, said police
had tried to pressure them to testify that they saw the defendant with the
purported murder weapon the day before the killing. Eyewitnesses were uncertain
whether Maininger was the murderer; their accounts consistently pointed to a
killer who was taller than the defendant.

On October 11, 2004, Judge Andrei Kirillov
acquitted the 29-year-old Maininger, saying the prosecution’s case was
untenable. After the acquittal, Nersisian told CPJ, he requested that
prosecutors in Moscow unify the Ivanov and Sidorov cases and re-investigate
them at the federal level, where the inquiry would be less susceptible to
political pressure. His requests were rebuffed, he said. The Togliatti
prosecutor’s office did not respond to written questions submitted by CPJ in
June.

Although authorities have reported no
further progress in either case, they have appeared, at times, to have harassed
Tolyattinskoye Obozreniye. In early 2008, after the paper endorsed an opposition mayoral
candidate, staff members found themselves fending off an unscheduled tax
compliance inspection and a raid in which police confiscated all 20 newsroom
computers. Officers said the computers had to be checked for counterfeit
software.

Mistrust of local law enforcement officials is high enough,
colleagues of the slain editors say, that new witnesses could be deterred from
coming forward. “Even if someone knows who ordered the crime, they won’t report
it officially,” said Davydov, the editor-in-chief.

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